Religion = child abuse? He’s said that. Repeatedly.

Memes? They were his idea. Though he has sworn off memes as an explanation of culture, he nevertheless said it.

His ‘naturalistic’ explanation of religion, without reference, not even a dismissive one, of the existing body of work that attempts to understand religion without reference to its ‘truth’? He wrote the bloody book.

And ‘brights’? He gave his backing to that label.

Which one were you referring to?

“If I say that fred is a liar, does it automatically follow that I believe that everyone who is not fred is telling the truth?”

No, but if you make a TV programme that says that it is Fred who, though his lies, is ‘the’ enemy of truth, then we should expect Fred to be the main, or at least a major enemy of truth. If it turns out to be the case that there are far, far bigger enemies of truth that remain unmentioned, and if it turns out that Fred is a nutter who no-one listens to, then the TV programme is a major act of misdirection. If we rail against the threat to reason, and attempt to animate people to defend reason, but we identify enemies who, as a consequence of their relative power, do not threated reason, while ignoring the very real threats to reason, then this is either misdirection or a demonstration of fundamental unreason. And misdirection and unreason are enemies of the truth just as much as a lie.

Odious as the physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.

- Richard Dawkins

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Since I haven’t read any of Dawkins’ book since the (excellent) Blind Watchmaker, I’m never sure whether he’s dumbing himself down in his comment articles and public lectures, or whether he really is slipping into self-caricature. There’s a really nice line in Andrew Brown’s old book “The Darwin Wars”, where he says something like `thoughtful Dawkins is the best antidote to vulgar Dawkins, but the latter is more in evidence increasingly’.

Any individual, group or culture which bases its epistemology on the belief that the bible is the literal word of God could not help but view the bible as being “helpful in forming a conclusion of judgment”.

Similarly, any individual, group or culture which bases its epistemology on the belief that sense-data provide an accurate picture of the objective world (also a tenuous assumption, though for different reasons) would have to disagree. As you are doing now.

Unfortunately, by aggressively insisting that someone’s basic epistemology is a “lie”, or “superstitious nonsense”, one is forcing them into a double bind; the outcome of which may be psychosis (the double bind is endemic to human life, as they say, but some are more susceptible to its disruptive effects than others). All minds have natural inbuilt defences against psychosis (the self-correcting nature of the mental system) which will tend to produce a more extreme adherence to the epistemology under threat in many.

Jim Bliss’s latest blog post… Me and Gregory

To be honest, I think you may be confusing the terms “evidence” with “scientific proof”. Information that may or may not support a certain thesis (or hypothesis) is evidence. It’s not proof.

Proof consists of either an huge weight of individual pieces of evidence pointing incontrovertibly in the same direction, or even of one piece of evidence of such enormous significance and unquestionable meaning. But evidence isn’t “anything that somebody says has meaning”. It has to have some status.

Beowulf is not evidence of the existence of monsters. It is evidence of the existence of belief in monsters, but not of monsters themselves. And the Bible doesn’t reach the status of evidence for the contentions that it makes. It’s not evidence for God. It makes contentions but in and of itself it provides nothing to back up those contentions. That’s important. A contention is not evidence.

Now one could produce evidence to back up some of its contentions. This is so, for instance, when it comes to the existence of Jesus. I don’t believe there was such a figure, but there is evidence for the contention that there was. But this, too, is an impotant distinction to grasp, that there can be evidence for a thesis that turns out in the end. not to be true. A lot of people don’t see this – in practice they don’t see the middle ground between proof and nothing. But that middle ground is where evidence resides. The Bible isn’t in it, though. That’s just “something somebody reckons”.

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However, I would respectfully suggest that — at a minimum — you might re-evaluate your statement regarding the bible as “evidence” (i.e. that it’s not). I think you may be confusing the meaning of the word “evidence” with that of the phrase “scientific proof”. A fact that actually illustrates my point in a roundabout way.

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Yes, but it isn’t. It is not evidence. And there is a limit to how reasonable or wise it is to refrain from saying so, merely because it would be tactful. To say so isn’t to dismiss the power of myths or their purpose or indeed their relationship to the truth: but it is to say something that is true. Why do people expect Dawkins not to say what is true? Might he not have a problem with that?

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No it doesn’t. I prefaced it with the word “perhaps” to indicate quite clearly that I was making a supposition based upon the evidence available to me. Academia has made me very deliberate in my choice of words.

Dawkins has in the past described the Christian creation myth both as superstitious nonsense and as a lie. The basis of his opinion is that the myth does not tally with the current scientific view of creation / human evolution. Given that the other creation myths I mentioned share the same property that Dawkins objects to in the Christian myth (that of failing to tally with the literal scientific version), it is a safe assumption that he would also need to charecterise them as superstitious nonsense and/or lies in order to remain consistent.

I suggested that you may share that opinion (again, the word “perhaps” indicates suggestion and indeed invites correction) because you are defending the confrontational attitude he has taken, which I assumed meant you were defending his characterisation of those myths as superstitious nonsense (given that is precisely what I am declaring is confrontational about his attitude).

If I am mistaken, then as mentioned, I invite correction. I would be particularly intrigued by any coherent argument that can describe the christian creation myth as superstitious nonsense yet at the same time avoid making the same statement about — for example — the Iatmul creation myth. I would be intrigued because, as of now, I cannot imagine such an argument.

I don’t think this is so, because I think it mistakes the nature of debate and particularly of debate about religion. Mutual polemics rarely end in the way they do in Plato, or in old religious pamphlets, with one side admitting their error and joining up with the other side. That’s not often what happens and even more rarely when we are dealing with the phenomenon of people choosing to belief something without having any evidential basis for it: we’re already to some degree outside the realms of the purely rational and one virtue of Dawkins is that he insists that this is both true and important.

With the greatest respect, this paragraph suggests that you may not have understood the point I was trying to make about the double bind and the mechanisms by which the human mind processes and learns new information (i.e. that inherent in learning is a pattern of interacting mechanisms or systems which contains information about the nature of authority, validity, truth and fact, and that disruptions to that pattern can be extremely destructive to the future ability of the mind to learn. As such we have in-built mechanisms that resist such disturbance). So when you talk about “the phenomenon of people choosing to belief something without having any evidential basis for it”, you are missing the crucial point that for a christian creationist, the bible provides exactly that evidential basis. A person or group who views the world in this manner must resist any direct attack upon the bible by becoming evermore entrenched in its defence. To do otherwise is to invite precisely that disruption which — in extreme cases — the double bind theory states will lead to psychosis.

Instead of stating that the bible is a lie, which will encourage fundamentalism, one needs to find a way of communicating a more complex view; that creationism is a version of the truth, just as the evolution is a version of the truth. One is mytho-poetic truth, the other scientific truth. One needs to communicate the fact that both versions have appropriate uses and fulfill different social needs. That by attempting to teach creationism as “science” one is not disseminating of a lie, but simply making an error of categorisation.

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